Oh, go ahead then! Pat yourself on the back little man! Celebrate! Six hundred what exactly mate? Right, 600 what? Posts? You posted 600 letters? Sure I did that yesterday on my last shift, picked up the stuff from the depot, biked around and I was in the pub by 4? Blog posts? What the fuck is a blog? One of them online thingys? Ah right, you just write whatever shot you want and it goes on the internet does it? You’d wanna get paid for that, son! So can I..can anyone just write any old crap they want on there? Do I not need a degree or somethin? Fuck me! Maybe I will give that a bash. Not tonight though. Maybe tomorrow. I’m shit with computers and all that technology malarkey. To be honest, I’m usually too hammered to get anything done at home. The job is fuckin wreckin me ya know? I’ve a got two shit knees and a low sperm count, the doctor says and me teeth are all gammy like. Fuck this, get us another whiskey there mate will ya? You can tell me more about these 600 posts you wrote over….four years. How many fuckin words is that? Ya don’t know? More than bleedin War and Peace was it? And what were you writing about sonny? music, cinema? you mean films ya ponce! just say films for fucks sake! Mister la de da! what you thought of them? sure who gives a fuck what you think? I tell who was a great band, i will tell you now! Are they around anymore? I don’t know….hey! Dan! Dan! Dan! Dan! What was the name of that band we liked back in the 80’s? yeah, they are still around! Duran Duran mate! Write about those lads and the Spandau ballet! oh man, those were the days! fuck, must be old now. Oh, you wrote about your feelings as well did you ya poof? ha ha, what the fuck is happening these days? everybody is talkin about their feelins, in public! In the pub! online, offline, outside, inside, on the streets….blah, blah, blah, I’m so fuckin hurt from something that happened when I was a kid! boo hoo! boo fuckin hoo! my wife left me for a younger man! boo hoo! Do you talk about any of that stuff on your blog? Here, come back mate! Come back! I’m only messin with you! Come on back, I will get you a drink and we can celebrate alright! No hard feelins! Whats the name of your thing? No dancing no satisfaction? Yeah, it kind of makes sense but then again I’m drunk as a goats uncle! Yeah, I think I will try writin a blog online. People will read it won’t they? I hope they will. I feel lonely…. sometimes. It gets lonely out here. I hope they read it.

When the darkness grips you, trying to drag you into its vortex, music so shimmering and beautiful that will exist in this life and the next will rise from a whisper to a shout, overwhelm it and set you free; a joy so natural that it feels as if it has existed inside you always will be released….or something like that.

Weak, quasi new-age, hippy dippy granola flavoured aphorisms aside….wait, what was I thinking again? Why am I asking you? As if you will be able to enlighten me as to what goes on this addled brain of my mine….Sorry, that sounds patronizing, insulting even. Please don’t go. Stay. I promise there is a cogent point to this whole ridiculous mess of verbiage spewing forth from my minds eye and a reasonably priced Hewlett Packard keyboard, possibly now out of production but if on the off-chance it still is, I’m open to any subtle cross promotion, keyword related marketing funds being thrown my way (wink wink)…

Yes, I’ve gone off the rails here which is to say…I blame the modern attention span etc…an attention span that lets itself be twittered, vined, Instagrammed and insta-everything’d on a daily nay second by second basis…bloody hell, everything is getting faster…WHY CANT WE JUST SLOW DOWN AND CONTEMPLATE STUFF AND THINGS AND STUFF AND TREES ETC?

Not everything used to be so fast, there was and maybe still is a time dear children when all musical output was not a standard 500rpm beat with disengaged,inane generic declarations of love and humping insidiously pumped into every corner of daily existence; cafes, bars, veggie hangouts, sports arenas, hypermarkets, old folks homes, rubbish tips, skyplanes, hamburger/tofu/hairdressing emporiums and so on but when we had music to slowed everything right the fuck down, man.

Who said that? Okay, all of this talk is just me trying to deal with growing older, feeling culturally irrelevant and ultimately impotent and pointless in the grand scheme of history and the cosmos?!!”@@@****??//?? hang on a second boss, that latter part of that sentence there! That’s how music makes me feel, great music, it’s mysterious hold on the conscious and unconscious part of our selves.

The ‘Massacre’ as I like to call them (Yeah I’m smug) gained some notoriety several years back when they featured in Dig!,a critically acclaimed account of their long standing rivalry with fellow Portlanders The Dandy Warhols. The documentary focused mostly on Massacre frontman Anton Newcombes penchant for self-sabotage which partly explained why despite critical acclaim the band had not broken away from their underground ghetto whilst the Warhols had somewhat flourished in the mainstream. Time seems to be have been kinder to Newcombe and his band with the bands 2005 track ‘Straight Up & Down’ chosen as the main theme tune for the recent HBO splashy period crime saga Boardwalk Empire no doubt giving the band some much needed validation.

With nary a warning, zero pre-publicity or hype – by industry standards anyway – there now exists a new My Bloody Valentine record! To call this a long-awaited event is understating it quite a bit. This new album m b v, is the follow-up to a now a revered, landmark work which now quite literally is a classic in terms of time with Loveless released back in 1991. The following year the band signed to the now defunct Island Records for a significant sum with Kevin Shields, the bands eccentric creative force promising a new album on several occasions in the past 22 years. Island eventually cut their ties with Shields after he had spent a significant sum of record company money to no avail. Material was written but Shields felt it unworthy of being released and his contract with Island, dissolved in 2001.

Some critics and observers have pointed to Shields obsessive perfectionism as a contributing factor to the delay of any new My Blood Valentine material but in the past decade or so, Shields emerged out of his seemingly self-imposed exile and been as busy as he has ever been working or collaborating in several different capacities as a producer, touring musician, remixer, noise consultant, soundtrack man, guest musician with a variety of artists and projects including Primal Scream, Sofia Coppola, Paul Weller, Patti Smith and the Manic Street Preachers. Indeed, for Coppola’s 2003 film Lost in Translation on which he contributed two new original tracks and provided several MBV tracks, he even found himself nominated for a BAFTA award.

With this new flurry of activity and the evolving exaltation of the group by the music media and a new generations of music lovers, Shields eventually reformed My Bloody Valentine in 2008 and they have toured on and off since with the promise of new material seemingly an empty one that is until a week ago when Shields told a no doubt sceptical audience at a gig in London that the album ‘might be out in two or three days’.

So, perhaps not two or three days but considering the two decade wait for new MBV , material, what’s a three or four-day delay matter at this stage, eh? You can buy the new album in vinyl, cd and digital format at http://www.mybloodyvalentine.org and/or listen to it track by track on YouTube.